Category Archives: Technique

As the March 11th release date of iPad2 gets near­er, I’m think­ing there’ll be a bit more activ­i­ty — espe­cial­ly as peo­ple fig­ure out new ways to take pho­tos with an 8x10 slab of glass and met­al 🙂

At the cen­tre of the con­tro­ver­sy was the legit­i­ma­cy of the image and the dis­cus­sion of the place for these apps in pho­to jour­nal­ism.

The pho­tog­ra­phers rebut­tal state­ment is a great read on its own — here’s one excerpt that brings home the issue as I see it:

At the heart of all of these pho­tos is a moment or a detail or an expres­sion that tells the sto­ry of these sol­diers’ day-to-day lives while on a com­bat mis­sion. Noth­ing can change that. No con­tent has been added, tak­en away, obscured or altered. These are remark­ably straight­for­ward and sim­ple images.

What has got­ten peo­ple so worked up, I believe, falls under the head­ing of aes­thet­ics. Some con­sid­er the use of the phone cam­era as a gim­mick or as a way to aes­theti­cize news pho­tos. Those are fair argu­ments, but they have noth­ing to do with the con­tent of the pho­tos.

We are being naïve if we think aes­thet­ics do not play an impor­tant role in the way pho­to­jour­nal­ists tell a sto­ry. We are not walk­ing pho­to­copiers. We are sto­ry­tellers. We observe, we chose moments, we frame lit­tle slices of our world with our viewfind­ers, we even decide how much or how lit­tle light will illu­mi­nate our sub­jects, and — yes — we choose what equip­ment to use. Through all of these deci­sions, we shape the way a sto­ry is told.

Do check out the full arti­cle. I’m in the ‘any­thing is a tool’ camp — any tool is valid, but the artis­tic and jour­nal­is­tic inte­gre­ty are para­mount in the cre­ation of the final image.

As long as the fun­da­men­tal truths depict­ed in the final image are those that were present at the time the ini­tial image was cap­tured are rep­re­sent­ed, it’s all fair game.

One thing about being into pho­tog­ra­phy; you quick­ly real­ize that there’s a lot to learn from oth­er pho­tog­ra­phers.

A sub­ject that’s always chal­lenged me has been the con­cept of mak­ing light work for me rather than forc­ing me to adapt to the demands of the light sources.

Learn­ing from oth­er pho­tog­ra­phers through their light­ing dia­grams has helped me bet­ter under­stand how a par­tic­u­lar tool (reflec­tor, barn doors, snoot, etc) should be used to get a spe­cif­ic result.

I’ve got the image, now what?
Tak­ing the pho­to is just the start­ing point. Once you have a neat image, you can eas­i­ly make it stronger by care­ful­ly apply­ing mod­ern dig­i­tal dark­room tech­niques.

In my case, I shoot on a Dig­i­tal SLR (Pana­son­ic Lumix FZ-30), or a Canon Pow­er­shot Point-and-shoot.

On the FZ-30, I shoot RAW+jpg, which poten­tial­ly gives me the most dig­i­tal infor­ma­tion to work with in the dig­i­tal dark­room. The Canon gives me .jpg so I have to take what I can get.